Travelling Companions Book

It's remarkable how a skilled writer like H.G. Wells can write fiction that resonates with readers a century later. This collection is a little gloomy in its view of humanity; one recurring theme is how preferable it is to die than it is to live in a way that restricts liberty. About half the stories of the collection embrace this theme.

Most of the collection merited four stars, but one story, the hardest to read of the collection, dropped it down to three. The collection deals with Armageddon, natural disasters, murder and other travesties, but the most horrifying of the collection is "Lord of the Dynamos"'a terrifying reminder of the rationalization widespread in Western society that attempted to excuse the enslavement of whole populations of people. Ideas expressed in this story fall right in line with writings from the likes of Karl Vogt and Samuel Morton, casually dropping references to racially-based intellectual inferiority, a tendency toward instinct over reason in Africans, and even racially correlated brain sizes. By far the scariest part of this collection, this story serves as a glaring and frightening reminder that very few among H.G. Wells' turn-of-the-century audience would have batted an eyelash at these ideas, which were used to defend historical horrors ranging from the trans-Atlantic slave nearly a century earlier to the Nazi eugenics program just a couple of decades into the future.